Greek Debt Talks Are Tested by Fraying Ties With Germany

BRUSSELS — Growing Greek antagonism toward Germany is coming at a bad time for Athens as it seeks a better debt deal with its European partners.

A demand on Tuesday night by the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, for wartime reparations from Germany cast a pall over negotiations for more rescue money for Athens that began in Brussels on Wednesday.

Germany, the biggest European lender to Greece, immediately issued a cool response to Mr. Tsipras’s comments, which were made in an address to the Greek Parliament.

Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel, said Wednesday that the issue of compensation linked to the Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II had been legally and politically resolved. “We should concentrate on current issues,” he said.

The rancor between Athens and Berlin, the two most important players in the Greek debt negotiations, seemed to emphasize the gulf between them. Without more loan money in the coming weeks, Greece could default on debt payments. That would raise the chances, still seen as remote, of the country’s becoming the first member to drop out of the euro currency union.

The debt talks in Brussels, involving officials from Greece and representatives of lenders from the so-called troika — the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund — are expected to be highly technical for now, with no immediate outcome.

But the discussions, along with plans for parallel talks involving creditor emissaries to Athens, are politically sensitive for Mr. Tsipras, whose Syriza party campaigned on a vow to not be bullied by the troika. That might be a reason he is feeling the need to take a hard line on German reparations — an issue that resonates deeply with Greeks.

It was not the first time that Mr. Tsipras has raised the issue of compensation from Germany. His proposal on Tuesday, to set up a committee to pursue the matter, may also be aimed more at buoying domestic support than at shaming Germany into easier terms on its loan program.

But the clamor could prove counterproductive, some experts say.

“Mr. Tsipras may have primarily had a domestic audience in mind,” said Guntram B. Wolff, the director of Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels. “However, in today’s world such a message gets discussed everywhere,” he added. “I am worried that these statements decrease German popular support for aid to Greece even further.”

Adding heat to the issue, the Greek justice minister, Nikos Paraskevopoulos, said on Wednesday that he was ready to enact a court ruling from 2000 allowing the seizure of German property in Greece as compensation for victims of a Nazi massacre in the village of Distomo. Mr. Paraskevopoulos suggested the timing of any such action would depend on the domestic debate over war reparations, rather than on Greece’s talks with creditors.

Mr. Tsipras has been forced to concede that representatives of the creditors would be allowed to visit Athens as the negotiations continue in Brussels.

Because many Greeks considered previous inspections by the foreign auditors to be a humiliation, the visits are an immensely sensitive matter for Mr. Tsipras and his sharp-tongued finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. Speaking this week, Mr. Varoufakis condemned the way the inspectors had previously displayed “a colonial attitude.”

Greek officials insisted on Wednesday that any visits by foreign officials to Athens would occur only when the groups meeting in Brussels required clarifications or additional data. The visits are expected to be coordinated by officials in Athens on neutral ground, like a hotel, rather than at government ministries.

But in practice the inspections will probably need to be more far-reaching, according to eurozone officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Gathering information about the state of the Greek banking sector, in particular, is likely to require sustained examination of detailed accounts, they said.

The comments by Mr. Varoufakis — a leftist academic with a fiery tone who lacks experience in government — have helped stoke weeks of tensions between Greece and its eurozone partners.

And mounting impatience with him on the part of some of his eurozone counterparts has also prompted speculation of an enhanced role for Giannis Dragasakis, the Greek deputy prime minister and a longtime politician. The Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, told reporters on Monday that giving Mr. Dragasakis’s office oversight of the technical talks in Brussels would represent “progress.”

Mr. Varoufakis and officials in Athens immediately insisted that there would be no change in the way the talks were being conducted.

In a sign of the high resentment in Greece toward Germany, some Greek media seized on remarks made this week by Wolfgang Schäuble, the no-nonsense German finance minister, interpreting them as insulting to Mr. Varoufakis.

In comments to reporters on Monday evening in Brussels, Mr. Schäuble said that he and Mr. Varoufakis had a long, intense talk. Both lamented the poor quality of some of the media coverage, the German minister said.

Speaking in German, Mr. Schäuble told reporters that he was far from thinking that the Greek minister was “suddenly naïve” as a communicator. Some Greek media outlets had mistranslated that phrase as the German finance minister deriding Mr. Varoufakis as “foolishly naïve.”

James Kanter reported from Brussels, and Niki Kitsantonis from Athens.